The recent Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa has been a terrible reminder of the
necessities of rapid evaluation and response to emerging infectious disease threats. For
such response to be fully informed, complex epidemiological data including dates of symptom
onsets, locations of the cases, hospitalisation, and contact tracing information have to be
analysed in near real time. Unfortunately, some of the tools required to bridge the gap
between data collection in regional offices and advanced statistical modelling are still
lacking.

Hackout 3 will aim to reduce this gap by bringing together field epidemiologists, decision
makers, modellers and computer scientists to create free, open-source resources for the real-time
monitoring of disease outbreaks. While new developments will largely build upon recent progresses
for epidemics analysis using the R software, other technologies will also be considered, including
existing tools for data collection (e.g. EpiInfo VHF), graph databases (Neo4j) and interactive,
web-based graphs (e.g. htmlwidgets, shiny, google charts).

The Participants

We are assembling an exciting team of people interested in developing the next generation of
tools for outbreak response, including modellers, statisticians, developers and public health
workers.

Note: this list will be growing over the next few days as participants are being
confirmed. The event should involve 30-40 people in total.

Schedule of events

Hackout 3 will be a five-days event, including a first day of brainstorming, leaving most of
the rest of the time for developing tools, discussing methods, and testing new approaches. The
Wednesday afternoon will be free, with possibility of a group hike for participants interested
in seeing a bit of the nature surrounding Berkeley.

Programme:
Every day will start with breakfast at 9-10am and finish at 6pm. Lunch will be served around 12:30.